China putting minority Muslims in 'concentration camps,' U.S. says - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-china-concentrationcamps/china-putting-minority-muslims-in-concentration-camps-u-s-says-idUKKCN1S925F <comment><USER2> The photo and caption are telling

> Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a > vocational skills education centre

Below a picture of a barbed wire prison

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, sure. And Guaido is the president of Venezuela

</comment><comment><USER4> The US is putting minorities into private prisons at far greater rates for nonviolent crimes. The rate of imprisonment is entirely correlated to race.

Yes whataboutism, but please think of an actual justification before you respond rather than the usual low effort handwaving it away with a single word.

Large powerful countries are carte blanche allowed to get away with horrendous injustices. I'd be eager to hear solutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate)

> half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non- > violent offenses, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses (in state > prisons; federal prison percentages are higher).

<comment><USER5> > please think of an actual justification before you respond

Why? Both systems are threats, one internal (from a US perspective), one external. Opposing one does not imply supporting the other, and US sins do not mean China presents less of a threat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whenever you read something like that that the "U.S. says" remember that the "U.S. said" for a long time that WMDs exist in Iraq and used that claim for a war. It turned out it was a complete fabrication, and that there were even helpers, e.g. Britain and Germany. So "UK said" it too and it was later completely obvious:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier)

"much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University. The most notable source was an article by then graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi"

Also:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector- admit...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd- lies-iraq-war)

Even older (Gulf War) claims of the "enemy" killing babies in the incubators were a complete fabrication:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony)

"The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah." It "was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized"

"On January 6, 1992, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by John MacArthur entitled "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?"[57]" "The story earned MacArthur the Monthly Journalism Award from The Washington Monthly in April 1992, and the Mencken Award in 1993."

<comment><USER7> Imho enough non-us sites have pointed out the fact that China has concentration camps. But hey, I guess there were doubters for nazi Germany too, and in this age, paid commenters trying to add doubt. Not that I'm accusing you directly, just I may be doubting your sincerity a little.

<comment><USER6> > Imho enough non-us sites have pointed out the fact that China has > concentration camps.

If they simply reported about the U.S. claims, or the sources are the same in some other way, that shouldn't count as "more proof". Again, see the WMD story, and consider how long main stream media in multiple countries hasn't questioned that, now proved false, narration.

> Not that I'm accusing you directly, just I may be doubting your sincerity a > little.

What you effectively promote is not even questioning the validity of some claims when it is e.g. "against China" so that as soon as I point the provable U.S. propaganda actions which even resulted in the wars before, I must be paid for that? In reality, those who are spreading the actual propaganda are those who are nicely paid for their work. That's exactly why I advocate extreme caution in unconditionally accepting the inflammatory claims, and the lines involving "Muslims in concentration camps" are obviously very much such.

<comment><USER8> Actually it's China that appears to be borrowing from the US propaganda playbook by using the war on terror as a pretext for incarcerating up to 30% of an ethnic and religious minority. Even Human Rights Watch has reported on them. [https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating- ideologica...](https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological- viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that link, I see no use of "concentration" camps term there.

Where do you get that 30 percent though? That would be at least more than 3 million people!

The biggest claim I know of is, as an example, 1700 out of some specific town of 32,000 inhabitants, and that could be realistic if the said town was indeed the center of the extremist activity, including some kind of preparing a paramilitary organization:

[https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/target-0629201813250...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/target-06292018132506.html)

Note how that specific claim (of around 5% of that 32000 people town) is first blown up to be "10%" and then put in the title as "One in 10 Uyghur Residents of Xinjiang Township Jailed or Detained in 'Re-Education Camp'" to bind the title not to the specific town but to the whole province with 11 million residents. Which is again less surprising knowing that it's RFA who publishes it that way:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia)

Paid by U.S. taxpayers, initially directly organized by the CIA. Now it is:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asia_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asia_Foundation)

"the US government described the Asia Foundation as a "quasi-nongovernmental organizations" and said that "the core of its budget" was still provided by the US government."

And even that RFA didn't use the "concentration" word.

<comment><USER8> I'm not claiming that I know the exact numbers; I don't. But this was reported by the same news outlet: [https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/millions-08032018142...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/millions-08032018142025.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does this article keep happening? Do we really think the United States gives a damn or are they just projecting? Any time the United States has a humanitarian concern it's a red flag to me. Xinjiang has abundant oil and mineral reserves, just saying...

<comment><USER9> Counternarrative about US-funded "World Uyghur Congress" separatists instigating this: [https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a- polic...](https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a-police-state- or-countering-western-sponsored-terrorism/)

<comment><USER10> Politico says that this website is part of a Russian government institution.⁰ Perhaps that's bunkum, but both sides fund propaganda about the other; most of the time, they will fund propaganda about things that are true—I remember Xinhua writing something entirely true about police brutality in the US for example—because true things are more credible.

The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient.

It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn't to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified.

As for the use of "separatism" as code for "a priori bad", this usage is entirely unjustified.

It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹

0\. [https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how- russi...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russia- targets-the-us-military-215247)

1\. [https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and- sec...](https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and- securitization-campaign-evidence-from-domestic-security-budgets/) — on the nature of the campaign; [https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas- algorithms-repr...](https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms- repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass-surveillance) — on mass surveillance.</comment></comment></comment>


Mental Poker: dealing cards, peer to peer - <AUTHOR> https://www.jotaen.net/2A4BQ/mental-poker-explained/ <comment><USER2> > Using strong and secure algorithms solves that (and other) problems but can > also introduce noticeable latencies at the same time, due to the overall > number of necessary cryptographic operations.

My knowledge of crypto is a bit rusty. What are some 'strong and secure' commutative cryptographic algorithms?

<comment><AUTHOR> ElGamal can be used, for example – you find a discussion of possible encryption schemes for Mental Poker in this paper[1] for example, but it is quite theoretical. I'll also link that in the post.

[1]: [http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/poker.pdf](http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/poker.pdf)</comment></comment>


Intro to modern hardware prototyping - <AUTHOR> http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/ <comment><USER2> Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it.

If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to learn and know how to use. You don't mention anything about a good debugger - this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.

Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing board assembly.

Just my quick 2c.

<comment><USER3> I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software is a naive port of the pen and paper schematic design process to mouse and keyboard (it's still called "schematic capture" in contrast to "PCB design") but Altium has moved far beyond that, especially with the introduction of cloud features in the last five years (like an online repository for user and vendor created footprints). The field of electrical engineering has been extremely averse to the ideas of open source but for many reasons, Altium's online resources among them, that is finally starting to change. Eagle does have a large community with companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit but those pale in comparison to the community forming around Altium, which is made up of a large number of vendors and professionals who are starting to grasp the benefits of sharing data.

Considering how much the package costs and how much Altium benefits from the growing community, I honestly don't think they'd mind if you pirated the software a few years before you could afford it.

<comment><USER4> I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software.

Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny. Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them.

I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impression it was. I had the impression that most purely-hardware-focused engineers didn't care about software quality much and so the whole industry just naturally leaned that way.

<comment><USER3> The thing with hardware is that once you've designed the PCB and it works to the spec, you don't need to do anything until some part you need goes out of production. This means that the major ECAD money comes from shops that do a lot of one off projects which means that aerospace and defense are king. Since those industries are risk averse and spend much more time in manufacturing and testing than in design, they never really had much care for the quality of design software, even when it costs an arm and a leg like Cadence. Since these industries have extensive quality control and review processes, a bug or a crash would only cost a little bit of time. Remember though that Orcad was first developed in the mid-eighties so with the risk averse clients it's no wonder it hasn't aged well.

But yes, rest assured, outside of some (rather large) niches, no one really tolerates the garbage that is the old ECAD packages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Site is down for me, here is a link to the Google cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TAFXX1s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TAFXX1snLgoJ:obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been getting into playing with Arduino's and Photons, and have some ideas that I'd like to THINK about taking to market, but all of these sort of intros seem to stop at the PCB stage. They leave off the part about how to get an enclosure made - designing one, prototyping it, injection molding, etc.

I think it's because that's where things get really expensive...

<comment><USER7> That and because the vast majority of products can use a standard, off the shelf enclosure. Problem is that many of the new product designers don't come from a hardware background and either aren't aware of the huge scope of what you can buy (and get modified cheaply) off the shelf, or they think that their product _must_ have a fully custom enclosure.

One of the benefits of having a traditional engineering education and experience is working alongside other engineers and designers who are trained in fields you weren't. It's really hard to put that type of combined experiences into a book or a tutorial.

<comment><USER6> Is there some way to find "of the shelf" enclosures online?

<comment><USER7> Besides the other suggestions, you can go to the source. Three of my favorite electronic enclosure manufacturers are Hammond, Bud and Polycase. Polycase in particular has pretty low setup and per-unit costs for modifying enclosures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an addition to this, it might be useful to go into more detail on the other aspects of making a hardware based MVP - i.e. 3D design, laser cutting and 3d printing.

Personally, I've alway gone in for using openSCAD[1] for the 3d design aspects, though clearly that's when approaching the problem as a programmer! I've always had laser cutting done by external services, but have a form labs 2 and repraps for printing parts. Perhaps this would justify a separate blog?

[1] [http://www.openscad.org/](http://www.openscad.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's great to mention github. Since you point out to be careful that some software has licenses, it is probably worth noting that software without a license means it reserves all rights [0]. No license != no copyright.

[0] [https://help.github.com/articles/open-source- licensing/#what...](https://help.github.com/articles/open-source- licensing/#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am working on getting the servers back up.

</comment><comment><USER10> This tutorial helped me with generating Gerbers since the Jeremy Blum video didn't really help me there

[https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-board- layou...](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-board- layout/generating-gerbers)

</comment><comment><USER11> Useful read and touches on several concepts I'm working through (or around) currently on a prototype. 2nd, maybe 3rd iteration thus far. Frustrating but the good kind of challenge.</comment>


Tell HN: My side project, Startup Wiki - <AUTHOR> http://startupwiki.co.uk

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this a while ago - but as a self-post not a link so it got very little notice :)

It's in much better shape now and someone suggested I submit it again. Please jump in and help out listing startups!

(inspiration was hnstartups.com which sadly ended up full of spam)

<comment><USER4> (I made hnstartups.com) Yeah... it did :/ and I didn't have a lot of time when I did hnstartups to put in a captcha. I like yours better, good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> I loved the simplicity of hnstartups!

This mostly started as a way to play around with a wiki-like site and community moderation tools :) and it kinda grew features from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this similar to crunchbase?

<comment><USER6> yea it's going to be tough to compete with crunchbase and/or tracked.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It's only a fun side project; if Crunchbase is missing something useful (one suggestion was already made today) then I probably will add it - so there might be a use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would try to increase security when you get around to it. Or at least prevent debug output for production servers.

<http://startupwiki.co.uk/search?q=+a%27%3BDROP+TABLE+*>

</comment><comment><USER8> What differentiates you from <http://younoodle.com/> and <http://crunchbase.com> ? The UI is cool by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The UI is cool by the way.

Thanks. It needs a bit of work but is getting there.

> What differentiates you

The ui? :) But seriously Im not really aiming to compete unless people _really_ like it. Just a side project to play with in my spare time - <USER2> hopefully it will be a useful tool alongside those sites.

Oh, more hacker friendly too I hope - the code is open source (<http://hg.errant.me.uk/startupwiki>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to lock an entry, like a bio? I could see some grumpy ex- coworkers taking their grumpyness too seriously and defacing entries.

Looks like a fun project!

<comment><AUTHOR> not currently. probably there will never be. There is a patrol page I keep an eye on to check whats been updated and make sure nothing bad is posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I added my project, though i would recommend either a phased sign up sheet, (step 1, step 2,...) with multiple forms, possibly some javascript validation before you submit the form, or don't refresh the form data after it submitted (why do i need to re-enter in everything instead of just what had an error). Possibly a get satisfaction or other feedback widget so you can get user feedback quicker.

I like the UI.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why do the revisions use a "global" incrementing id for their public-facing revision number? It may be more user friendly to make a per-startup revision number so they're in chronological order (as in, "Initial revision, revision 1, revision 2" instead of showing "Initial revision, revision 13, revision 14".) I was confused by that particular aspect when I first saw it.

</comment><comment><USER12> A friend of mine did something similar for Austrian startups: <http://www.startupwiki.at/> (in German, but it's basically a short summary for every company, information on where to get funding, and so on)

Might be interesting to add regional filtering to your project?

</comment><comment><USER13> A jobs section on the homepage might be useful. It could just list recent job edits on any of the startup page.

</comment><comment><USER14> (Impossible CAPTCHA) + (Form That Zeros Itself on Error (including missed captcha)) = Really really annoying user experience.

I missed 7 CAPTCHAs in a row before giving up. Perhaps you could turn it down a notch?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didnt realise it never saved your progress - easy enough to fix tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> seeing reddit in this list, i wonder to myself: at what point is a startup no longer considered a startup? when is it better to start using "startup" in past tense?

<comment><USER16> Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast - I would suggest that this means the company has graduated from startup status?

<comment><USER17> For people reading Startup Wiki, it might be interesting to follow a startup through the full life cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would change your ordering of the recents. Looks like when you update your entry you go back up to the front. Definitely could be abused. Overall I like it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was thinking something like this would be great. Keep getting a few people ask where they can find co-founders. I'll point them at this now :) Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a domain and part built site more specifically tailored for that - <USER3> some family issue got in the way of finishing it... stay tuned maybe :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why are you publishing the IP addresses of people who update their listings?

 _"Updated 6m ago by 184.108.40.206"_

<comment><AUTHOR> it's a wiki :)

<comment><USER20> Yes but I question what function it serves and whether that function outweighs the drawback of potentially discouraging some people from participating. The last thing a new site needs is obstacles to user involvement and I would imagine your geek audience could be more sensitive to online privacy issues than, say, the more general audience of Wikipedia where this practice was first ingrained. Just my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> what about if I obscured part of the IP on the front page?

EDIT: done. Your right that is better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Clicking on the logo doesn't take me back to the home page. You might want to fix that :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> nice and clean UI, i have used kohana php framework before, its very clean and easy to use, idea for side projects.

one thing i noticed is that you haven't have a customized 404 page(maybe you need to put your app in production mode:(.</comment>


The Cambrian explosion of animal life now seems more like a whimper - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/strange-worms-are-taking-their-place-on-your-family-tree <comment><USER2> The Cambrian "explosion" was based on the fact that Cambrian rocks have many new organismal forms and body plans not found earlier in the fossil record. Analysis of DNA sequences from currently living organisms suggests that this diversification occurred much earlier than the Cambrian. Scientists that focus on DNA infer that these diverse organisms simply failed to leave a fossil record. Meanwhile, many paleontologists don't like the idea of such substantial gaps in the fossil record.

<comment><USER3> Great summary. I, for one, was surprised to hear this, and yet feel like I shouldn't have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Journal Citation: Johanna Taylor Cannon, Bruno Cossermelli Vellutini, Julian Smith, Fredrik Ronquist, Ulf Jondelius, Andreas Hejnol. Xenacoelomorpha is the sister group to Nephrozoa. Nature, 2016; 530 (7588): 89 DOI: 10.1038/nature16520

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish Gould were still alive to defend his theories.</comment>


First mention of the Pentium 4 on LKML - <AUTHOR> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.2/0538.html <comment><AUTHOR> Intel CPUID supplement for P4 was published in July 2000:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000815074548/http://developer.i...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000815074548/http://developer.intel.com/design/processor/future/manuals/CPUID_Supplement.htm)

NT4 SP6 was released in November 1999. Previously, NT4 was truncating CPUID family field to three bits (instead of the correct four bits), as you can see on [http://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/cpu/identifi...](http://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/cpu/identification.htm) Family 7 was already used by Itanium.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actually, here is another post: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/5/89](https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/5/89)</comment>


China Invests Big in Clean and Cheap Energy from Thorium - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/press-release/china-invests-big-in-clean-and-cheap-energy-from-thorium <comment><USER2> AFAICT this article offers no dates, no numbers, and no primary sources. China _did_ announce a thorium research program back in 2011, and continues to publish research, but I don't see any notable recent developments reported on other sites.

The IAEA does not currently list any reactors matching this description in operation or under construction in China:

[https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....](https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN)

World Nuclear News does not have any recent stories about Chinese thorium reactors.

Is this article just a rehash of old news? Or has a Chinese thorium reactor achieved criticality recently? Videos of simulations and 3D renderings are a dime a dozen. New reactor concepts are interesting only when someone operates real hardware. China _can_ do so but there's nothing in this article that makes me think it _has_ just done so.

<comment><USER3> Something here: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-government-invest- bil...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-government-invest-billions- molten-salt-reactor-deng/)

>[late 2017] China Academy of Sciences and the government of Gansu Province signed a co-operation agreement to work together on China's Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR) project and to have a demonstration or research reactor built in Gansu Province by 2020.

>The total investment was planed to be 22 billion CNY (3 billion USD)

<comment><USER2> Right, some other documents I found indicated that there would be a research reactor scheduled for 2020. But the documents I found about it were from before 2018. I couldn't understand why this story was published in August 2018. There doesn't appear to be anything new happening right now. The next interesting development will be when the research reactor actually starts up, hopefully in 2020.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a better source for this than "Thorium Energy World"?

<comment><USER5> You can try googling "Chinese TMSR Strategic Pioneer Science and Technology Project site:sinap.ac.cn" and "TMSR site:sinap.ac.cn". Or even just "thorium site:sinap.ac.cn".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is basically translated from the Shanghai Institute of Applied physics (www.sinap.ac.cn) press releases.

It will be interesting if China develops a complete Thorium fuel cycle and the reactor designs to take advantage of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wasn't Bill Gates a strong proponent for (and even investor in?) thorium reactors? Did that pan out?

<comment><USER8> Gates has put a lot of money into TerraPower to develop their traveling wave reactor tech:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor)

And routinely works eg with China:

[Nov 2017] "Bill Gates' nuclear firm TerraPower and the China National Nuclear Corporation have signed an agreement to develop a world-first nuclear reactor, using other nuclear reactors' waste"

[https://www.smh.com.au/business/bill-gates-and-china- partner...](https://www.smh.com.au/business/bill-gates-and-china-partner-on- worldfirst-nuclear-technology-20171106-gzfrf0.html)

<comment><USER9> TeraPower is a clever attempt at a fast reactor using uranium/plutonium fuel. We have had various fast reactors (commercial and research) since the 70s. IIRC they tend to be very twitchy, and have proliferation issues.

Thorium reactors, a.k.a LFTR, a.k.a. "hope-ium" are still very much on the drawing board. They have some nice properties (stability, safer, liquid based).

p.s. I am pro renewable. Nuclear will comeback around 2050 when we run out of space...

<comment><USER10> Can anybody provide any real-world examples of _proliferation issues_ from nuclear material?

<comment><USER11> Australia's export of uranium to India.

India has made an explicit decision not to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). As a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Australia is supposed to export only to countries that have signed the NPT. An exemption has been granted to India. This means India is receiving uranium from Australia, but its facilities are not subject to the full range of inspections required under the NPT. It's reasonable to assume that India will go as far as it can in its role as a non-signatory to the NPT.

Essentially India said "trust us", and Australia said "show us the money."

<comment><USER12> India has been a nuclear power since 1974.

<comment><USER11> I guess you're right under the definition of proliferation being a new nation gaining nuclear weapons. I was thinking of proliferation, in the sense of their being more nuclear weapons, even if it doesn't involve a new nation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These reactors do refine uranium 232. So still making something that is really dangerous. [https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Given the vast quantities of existing depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel I feel the molten chloride fast breeder reactor should come first.

<comment><USER15> Can't you just use a Candu reactor for that now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ah, Thorium.</comment>


Tell HN: Algolia search stemming issue - <AUTHOR> See screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/t6Ydooc.jpg<p>I don't think I needed that "Chicago" result. Does algolia  need manual filters for errors like this or is it some ML anomaly? <comment><USER2> What you're actually experiencing is the result of Algolia's typo-tolerance & prefix searching (both enabled on the HN Search). Indeed, both " _chica_ go" and " _chine_ se" are 1 letter away from "china". We've configured the search to disable the prefix search once you press "Enter" (maybe not easy while on mobile).

<comment><USER3> > We've configured the search to disable the prefix search once you press > "Enter"

I thought you were joking but it's true. Try removing all characters here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) and type out "china", look at the bottom results and then press "Enter", now you get different stories.

What awful UX, what was the thinking behind that? People who search for the same thing gets different results, depending on if they actually searched or if they just typed it out.

<comment><USER4> No, that's the price of typo tolerance and search-as-you-type, until the user validate the query you have no way to distinguish between prefix and full word.

Search-as-you-type is much more a guide during the search, it shows you a preview of possible results from what you've currently typed both as a whole query and as the beginning of a query.

All other variation are worth: no prefix during search as you type means that you'll have an empty result most of the time or things that are completely irrelevant; keeping prefix on the final search means that you'll see a lot of irrelevant results (especially with typo-tolerance).</comment></comment></comment>


Feedback needed for an iPhone app :) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/app/zenexpense/id825512914

<comment><USER2> Love the icon design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :) Did you by any chance happen to try the app aswell? Would love to hear your feedback!</comment></comment>


Lots of People Are Losing Distance Vision, and No One Knows Why - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/02/silent-epidemic-myopia/ <comment><USER2> Nobody knows why? I don't believe that. I can tell you why. Because they keep looking and focusing on their computer monitors, their laptop screens, their tablets, and their phones, and rarely look up. For hours, for weeks, for months, for years. For kids who are still developing, surely this will be an issue. People playing computer games that create effects that their eyes would normally do; blur effects, dust effects, light effects... Prolonged usage is confusing their eyes - Eyes trying to unblur a blurred screen. Eyes trying to look deep into the distance, but in truth they are focusing on a screen 12 inches away... When's the last time these people 'losing distance vision' got outside and looked around?

</comment><comment><USER3> People are spending every waking hour looking at screens up close and our eyes are adjusting.

This isn't new, nor is it surprising. Many optometrists know this.

<comment><USER4> Insufficient exposure to bright light is the most accepted explanation, not time spent focusing up close. 90% of Asian schoolchildren are shortsighted.

<comment><USER3> I think there might be some cause and effect there... how often do you look at a screen in bright light?

<comment><USER5> Um, unsurprisingly, they thought of that

> Rose's team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for > example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and > that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor > sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether > children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. > And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less > time with books, screens and close work. "We had these children who were > doing both activities at very high levels and they didn't become myopic," > says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to > matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.

[http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia- boom-1.17120](http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120)

The evidence is far from overwhelming, but the data is a lot more useful than your layman intuition...

<comment><USER3> Calm down fancy pants. I'm sorry I was responding to the information in the article rather than going out and doing more research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Up until just very recently everything we viewed was reflected light, now we are bombarding our eyes with light shining directly into our eyes, TV, Computer screens, phone screens.

It's impacting our vision, and I think it's playing a role in concussion issues.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a topical click bait tittie for Wired.

Researchers and medical community already are reaching consensus on the why. Being the leading theory a deficiency in the sphericity of the ocular globe due to a lack of a growth hormone that ought gets triggered correctly if you have enough exposition to sun light while growing up.

<comment><USER8> More specifically bright lights and sharp gradients on the retina stimulate the release of dopamine in the retina which blocks the elongation of the eye.

[http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia- boom-1.17120](http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120)</comment></comment>


Vivian Maier: A life's work seen for first time - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12247395 <comment><USER2> I submitted this last week but it didn't get any traction:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095598>

 _John Maloof, a 29-year-old eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent, is now principal cheerleader in the effort to find a niche for Ms. Maier at the pantheon of modern photography. He is only about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, working with his friend Anthony Rydzon. And they have yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls._

[http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street- photogra...](http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street- photography-60-years-old/)

The photos are truly extraordinary.

Watch this terrific segment too - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWEDOnBfDUI>

And for those of you fortunate enough to reside in Chicago - [http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_la...](http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_landing/events/dca_tourism/FindingVivianMaier_ChicagoStreetPhotographer.html)

<comment><USER3> It's kind of an interesting question -- usually importance in the art world is a combination of excellence and influence. So even if you hate Andy Warhol, you have to admit the guy was influential, so he deserves his place in art history.

Now we have a case of someone whose work was excellent, but for obvious reasons could not possibly have influenced anyone else. Where should she be in the history of art?

<comment><USER4> The same place as Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson. She had little influence while she was alive, but will gain more as time goes on. Posthumous fame is a cliche in the arts.

<comment><USER3> van Gogh only got serious about painting in the last decade of his life, and even then he was pretty well known.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumous_fame_of_Vincent_van_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumous_fame_of_Vincent_van_Gogh)

Toulouse-Lautrec even challenged another artist to a duel over the worth of van Gogh's paintings.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh_chronology#189...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh_chronology#1890)

I'm only an amateur aficionado of photography, but Vivian Maier seems a bit different. The quality is undeniable but the style seems a bit derivative or antique by 2010 standards. At least so far, I don't see territory that hasn't been well covered by other street photographers.

Maybe more treasures will be unearthed from the collection, though.

A thought just struck me: maybe she just couldn't afford, or never had time, to get her negs developed. What sort of photographer might she have become if she could have closed that loop just a bit faster, or easier?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Maier was untrained, but her images are artfully framed and detailed_

So much has been accomplished by those who were "untrained, but". I wonder if that says as much about the training as it does about the accomplishments.

<comment><USER6> It reminds me of the sculptor who said that _he_ wasn't making the sculpture. "It's already in there. I'm just removing excess material."

Sometimes I feel that our brains are like that. That some of our abilities are inherent. They just have to be set free.

<comment><USER7> > _"That some of our abilities are inherent. They just have to be set free."_

Heavily disagreed. I'm a street photographer myself (self-trained), and Maier's work has been inspiring both from an artistic and motivational perspective.

These abilities aren't "inherent". They take years and years of practice to hone, and a constant criticism of your own work (from yourself or otherwise).

I don't think any photographer ever picked up a camera, figured out how to work it, and then just started taking good work. Bear in mind also that I don't know a single street photographer who's able to shoot anything close to >5% keepers, much less show-ers.

When you view art like this, keep in mind that not only is it a highly selected slice of the artist's entire body of work, but also you are looking at what is most likely their top work at the prime of their abilities. What you don't see are the years of producing forgettable, boring, and downright bad work to get there.

<comment><USER8> The article talks about 100,000 negatives laying around. This was years of work and probably a daily activity. Hardly qualifies as "inherent".

<comment><USER7> That reminds me of something I dislike about street photography - there are the Greats - people like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Garry Winogrand, etc. that are positively _worshipped_ in the street photography community.

To the point where _anything_ that they ever produced is automatic gold. People don't seem to account for the fact that, like all other artists, 99% of what these people produced is somewhere between utter crap and not great.

But nope. If it was shot by HCB, it's automatically a divine work gifted to us by the Gods of Photography themselves. Ugh.

<comment><USER9> There is a difference between the already vetted produce of someone like HCB and the raw produce we are dealing with here. Of course he produced crap, but that crap has never seen the light of day. I doubt anyone wandering upon a pile of thousands of his photographs would consider them automatic gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting addendum: John Maloof, who 'dicovered' her work, as it were, decided to try and locate her after some time. His search turned up her obituary. It had been posted the previous day.

</comment><comment><USER11> In other discussions I've seen people raise the copyright issues. Her estate owns the rights to these works, not John Maloof. But I don't think anyone except her heirs or other beneficiaries would have standing to sue him. They're either non-existent (she had no known children) or not interested. I'm afraid that won't stop people from causing problems for him once there's money involved.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how there could be much legal standing for that position. If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and the rights to distribute it.

<comment><USER13> > _If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate > has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong > case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and > the rights to distribute it._

Copyright law doesn't work that way. This argument is expressly addressed in 17 USC 202: " _Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied._

" _Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object; nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object._ "

(Extra paragraphing added.)

<comment><USER12> Sure, if I sell you a copy of my novel or of a photograph that doesn't necessarily mean, of itself, that I've transferred ownership of the copyright to that work. Even if I've sold you the original handwritten manuscript or the original photographic slide. Even in the absence of any explicit agreement on my part in regards to the disposition of the copyright. However, if I sell every known copy of the work to you while _intentionally depriving myself of any copy and the ability to reproduce copies_ , then there is a very much stronger case that through that action I've transfered the rights to the work.

As far as I know that seems to be the case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The headline makes me think.

The article admits that we know virtually nothing about Vivian Maier. There is nothing that implies her life was "lost" in her eyes, nothing to prove that she lived differently than she would have liked to have lived. her work was nearly lost to the glare of publicity but would have been our loss, not hers.

<comment><USER15> It is ambiguous: "a lost (life's work)" is the intended interpretation.

"rediscovered" is more like it.

Of course you could talk about "a (rediscovered life)'s work" in an interesting way too...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kickstarter project: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding- vivian...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier- a-feature-length-documentary)

<comment><USER16> Just pledged. Currently it's got $67K+ pledged for its $20K goal

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat story with many parallels to other areas of life (yes, even the hacker's life).

Side note: I enjoy the comments, but some remind me of Reddit. I think there may be some inbreeding going on here. I say this in good humor.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very poignant story! Her photos are exquisite. Her solitary and obscure life brought tears to my eyes on this cold Chicago morning.

Yet, this story gets only 3 points (so far)? Guys, there are more things to heaven and earth than tech and financial stuff. I hope it makes to first page.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a analogy with failed startups, in that she created something of value, but was never was able to promote it (assuming she tried).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the point of photographs like this though?

(philosophical question)

<comment><USER19> What good is a baby?

<comment><USER18> You're saying this collection is going to change into something more useful/poignant in about 15 years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> fascinating! thanks for posting.</comment>


The Robotics Industry Could Learn a Lot From Puppeteers - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/the-future-of-robots-should-look-like-puppets-8d52634d91a4 <comment><USER2> This is actually extremely well known to most people building robots. Anybody who's ever met Peter Dilworth will have seen his slides talking about how all you need to make something artificial relatable is a set of articulated eyebrows and he's right. Expressiveness is a game changer. It's just that it's far from the most pressing issue right now.

The article mentions that we (robotics researchers) don't think about movement first but the fact of the matter is that those of us working on humanoids can't STOP thinking about movement and how hard of a problem it is to solve. The issue is that we don't have anywhere near the technology in either electric motors or hydraulic actuation that is required to solve the problem of smooth, high-fidelity, accurately-controlled motion that is also safe for human co-operation (which typically means torque control or some other scheme for feedback control over the impedance between the robot and the environment). Hydraulics are far too "stiff" and dangerous to be used in robots that work directly alongside humans, and electric motors can't hit the torque vs. velocity requirements for dynamic motions that allow the robots to be both safe and expressive and dynamic like a living organism.

But nobody is funding research in to actuation because it doesn't have short term payoff and it isn't sexy. So here we are.

<comment><USER3> I have a bit of trouble performing some tasks that a smaller person could easily do, because when I was weight lifting, I had a few incidents where I pushed or pulled on something as hard as I remembered and ended up breaking it. I trained myself never to push as hard as I absolutely can, because if it takes that much pressure I'm probably doing it wrong.

I don't follow cycling as much as I used to, but in an attempt to keep rich teams from building bicycles out of unobtanium, they put some minimum weight restrictions on the bikes. One of the early results was that some telemetry gear started getting built into these bikes. The biggest one I know of was building a torque meter into the rear wheel. For the cost of a fraction of a percent of power output, it could tell the coach if you're really going all out or dogging it. The difference in those numbers would hint at you being sick, a subtle equipment failure, or an aerodynamics problem.

It should take a certain range of force to open a door, drill a hole, tighten a bolt, or raise a platform. If you are using more than that, something is jammed, your bit is wearing faster than expected, the bolt is cross threaded, or something is stuck on the platform and you're trying to ram it through the roof.

Some tools are very difficult to scale up to high torque situations, but it seems like this data should be available to a robot, via sensors on the power supplies if nothing else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Robotics is a truly fascinating technical field - I was originally drawn to it because of its potential and its complexity. There is something alluring about having to understand mechanical, electrical, and software engineering expertly to create something unique.

What I quickly discovered though is it dominated entirely by technologists who believe that developing better technology will solve hard problems, without actually understanding the real intricacies of the problems they say they are solving.

There are so many brilliant engineers in robotics, and very few talented designers, product managers, and other necessary people to make robotics technology useful and ubiquitous for everybody. And that's probably why we have articles like this - because engineers only know about engineering (broadly speaking).

</comment><comment><USER3> > By being so focused on making objects look lifelike, do engineers overlook > what truly makes them expressive?

This reminded me of Keepon:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3g-yrjh58ms](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3g-yrjh58ms)

Basically an unarticulated clown nose with dots for a face and 3 degrees of freedom.

And yet it is clearly dancing. In other videos it manages to look contemplative when it is processing data.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Na'vi Shaman by Disney is the best example.

[https://robots.ieee.org/robots/navishaman/](https://robots.ieee.org/robots/navishaman/)

Previous generations of animatronics lacked the fidelity of motion that this one has. Disney's experience with CG animation shows through here, which is animating with CG puppets.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting discussion, but I am not sure we need to add expressiveness to a Roomba... I suppose it depends on how much time the robot will have an audience? For bots that are intended to interact with people, I can certainly see the value; but lots of them intentionally work when no human is there to see them.

<comment><USER7> The old Roomba I had made these really expressive chirps to communicate when it's was starting, finished etc. If it got stuck on something it would make an apologetic "uh-oh" type of tone, and if it succeeded at something it would play a happy tone. My newer model roomba now uses a really low quality prerecorded voice that says things like "error". It sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> robotics != animatronics

I dont care how sympathetic my mechanical slave is. I just want it to spot weld my car bodies perfectly, repeatedly and cheaply.

People adapt to technology -- you dont need to anthropomorphize the outputs, you need to make them simple to understand. LEDs, tones, motion etc can all do this without getting in the way of a robots core functions the way a sophisticated expressive system would. R2D2 'nuff said

</comment><comment><USER9> if we had robots as articulated as people to puppeteer the other robots then they'd be as lifelike as people can make puppets

<comment><USER10> It's puppeteers all the way up!

A robot puppeteer is easier than an autonomous robot because it can have the weight of its actuators in a fixed base.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Greatest Quality Feeds In Finance - <AUTHOR> http://filll.com

<comment><USER2> you're missing minyanville.com</comment>


FBI pushes for surveillance backdoors in Web 2.0 tools - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/fbi-pushes-for-surveillance-backdoors-in-web-20-tools.ars

<comment><USER2> Maybe instead of trying to get more power they should get their heads out of their respective asses and start doing their damn job: catch and prosecute criminals on behalf of the victims.

They have no reason to be in Washington at all.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, it's the FBI's job to advocate for more power that can be used in investigation. It's someone else's job to decide whether or not they should have that power. Also, their job frequently involves speaking to members of Congress.

Not saying they're right in this instance, but they are doing their job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Next thing they'll want the ability to track anyone's phone calls!

Oh wait.

All I can say is: leave our internet alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> see link for full story [http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fbi.internal.documents/...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fbi.internal.documents/index.html) CNN exclusive: FBI misconduct reveals sex, lies and videotape

By Scott Zamost and Kyra Phillips, CNN Special Investigations Unit January 27, 2011

Editor's note: Some content in this report may be offensive to readers. For more on this CNN exclusive story, watch Kyra Phillips' full report on "The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer" tonight starting at 5 p.m. ET.

Washington (CNN) -- An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.

A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while "satisfying himself."

And an employee in a "leadership position" misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.

These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is why I'm worried about companies like Greplin. For the FBI, it's 1 convenient place to go if they want all your communications.

<comment><USER7> Hadn't heard about Greplin before. Interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is boneheaded and will never happen. No startup will make "comprehensive government wiretap ability" one of their first product priorities.

If they are forced to then it'll result in companies moving to countries that don't have silly restrictions like this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Scenario: Unbeknownst to the FBI, programmers at the companies they hired to write the backdoors and other programmers at companies they hire to audit the backdoor writers are members of Anonymous, who then conspire to put secret pet doors in the backdoors. In the meantime, /b/ has fun with memes involving 'backdoor' and even prime numbers.</comment>


IKEA introduces wireless charging furniture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pressroom/press_materials/USA_PR_Wireless_charging.pdf <comment><USER2> Recurring question I've not heard answered: any issues between these wireless charging pads vs pacemakers? It's a subject rather close to my heart...

<comment><USER3> Because they're usually inductively coupled rather than RF coupled they shouldn't cause a problem I would think. They also have to detect a resonant coil near the primary before they'll output significant current because otherwise they'll heat up and burn out the primary coil. So while I wouldn't put the pace maker on top of one, I would think it wouldn't cause problems directly. The standard disclaimer here applies: I am not a doctor, I am not a lawyer, I am not an electrical engineer, This advice should not be taken by those with neck injuries, pregnant women, small children, the elderly, the living challenged, or immortal beings.

<comment><USER4> "Inductively coupled rather than RF coupled"? What's the difference?

<comment><USER5> He means coupled using a magnetic field (like a transformer) rather than using an electric field (like a transmitter).

They're related, to make things more complicated, see Maxwell.

[http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/Ma...](http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/Maxwell_Eq.html)

<comment><USER6> pacemakers act up near high voltage power lines and transformers.

Most modern PM's are actually much more resistant to RF induction than one from strong magnetic fields mainly due to the saturation of the RF spectrum over the past 2 or so decades coupled with a decline in high voltage power in populated areas (they are underground as well as farther from residential areas these days).

That said I have no idea if the field those things generate is strong enough to create any issue with PM's or similar devices (like the "jump start" internal defibrillator some people are getting these days).

I would think that these devices are quite safe, especially considering that you see wireless charging station in courtesy area's in lobbies and other public places without any warning signs.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the health risks of wireless charging is still unknown without longitudinal studies. Are you sure you want this kind of devices at home where your kids can access it easily?

<comment><USER6> I wasn't talking about long term health risks like cellphones give you brain cancer and WiFi makes you blind.

But there are guidelines for certifying consumer electronics compatibility with medical devices is on that list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was in Ikea yesterday and we bought two nightstand lamps with integrated chargers. Did not even realize that yesterday was the first day they were on sale... (in Germany).

Unfortunately, they do not work reliably with my Nexus 4. After putting the phone on the charger it does start charging, but cuts off after a couple of seconds and the charger starts flashing its LED (which is supposed to indicate an error). The phone did not charge at all last night on the charger. I don't know if this is an issue with my Nexus 4, which is already bit beat up, or if there is some kind of incompatibility...

Anybody have any experience with these kind of wireless chargers? Are there compatibility issues?

<comment><USER9> I don't know if you're aware or not, but the charging location on the Nexus 4 is a little off-center, so if you centered it, that might be causing issues.

> Nexus 4: One inch (25mm) below the center of the phone

[https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6073618?hl=en](https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6073618?hl=en)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for tip! Did not help, unfortunately. It seems to connect only for a couple of seconds and then stops charging. After moving the phone a bit it will "reconnect", but again only for a short time. Alas, I do not have access to another phone with wireless charging capability to check where the problem is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why, but I find this exciting. It makes me happy to know in the future that for smartphones we will not need to worry about building bigger and environment damaging batteries for our phones. Instead, you can go out and know that there'll most likely be a charger wherever you go.

The likes of Starbucks are already offering wireless charging, McDonald's is slowly rolling out wireless charging (currently only in the UK). Eventually almost everywhere you go there will be a charger. I think wireless charging is one of the more exciting things to happen in a while (even though the tech has been around for a long time).

<comment><USER11> I'm no expert on batteries, but won't constantly charging the phone battery after small discharges (While you go between places with chargers) cause it to die sooner?

<comment><USER12> Assuming modern battery charging technology and Li-* batteries, no, they would not last less than otherwise.

See [https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium- ion/](https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/) for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The three leading wireless charging standards are Qi, Powermat, and A4WP.

IKEA is using Qi. Starbucks is using Powermat. Uh oh.

We're headed for a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD problem.

<comment><USER14> This problem's already solved. Qi _is_ the standard.

Duracell Powermat is effectively just Qi with proprietary advertisement and tracking codes (light DRM) added on to it. As far as I can tell, it only exists because Duracell keeps throwing money at it.

This isn't a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD problem. It's more like a CD vs MiniDisc fight. Or a USB vs Lightning fight.

<comment><USER15> What? Isn't that the same issue, they're incompatible with each other? So does Qi work with Powermat and vice versa?

<comment><USER16> They are incompatible. Up until recently, only Qi charging was available for phone. PMA was mostly supported by places like Starbucks offering wireless charging because it can track individual users. Samsung Galaxy S6 is the first phone to work with both Qi and PMA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cableless computing is one of the most exciting things going on in the computer world, IMHO.

Just look this Intel demo :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reDkEesnTpE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reDkEesnTpE)

<comment><USER18> 2 inches of material, and enough power to charge a laptop? That is seriously impressive. And this guy is really good at presenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That PDF is misleading. On Page 2 there is a women clearly holding an iPhone, without a cover, but if you go to Page 28 you get to see massive clunky covers which add wireless charging support to the iPhone. There are other examples in the PDF, but that is the most obvious, and easy to grasp.

Essentially most of this furniture won't work with the vast majority of phones, only the small handful that support wireless charging, and those are typically flagships.

<comment><USER20> True. They probably should have used some Lumias and Android phones since there are plenty of those that look sufficiently glamorous for these photo shoots and won't leave observant technical audiences feeling misled.

That said, wireless charging doesn't _feel_ to me like a "flagships only" feature. I've been using Qi with my Lumia 920 for 2 years now; this doesn't seem like a flagship phone, but perhaps it was when I got it?

<comment><USER21> > True. They probably should have used some Lumias and Android phones since > there are plenty of those that look sufficiently glamorous for these photo > shoots and won't leave observant technical audiences feeling misled.

You obviously didn't even open the link - the very first thing you see on page 1 is a Samsung (Galaxy S4, I think?).

<comment><USER22> It is often necessary to read the entire context of a comment within its thread, as that may change the meaning entirely. Misinterpreting the meaning of a comment and responding to something the poster didn't say can, as you discovered, lead to downvotes.

<comment><USER21> I don't see how this is an issue of context. Yes, it's a little misleading for them to show an iPhone. But the comment I replied to said "they should have used some Lumias and Android phones" \- which is exactly what they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Their $30 "JYSSEN" charger-for-a-hole product (found on page 25 of the PDF) looks excellent.

I've built a Nokia Qi charger into my desk (now used with my Galaxy S5) but the oblong form-factor of the coil and charger circuit did not lend itself to easy installation.

The round product looks perfect for retrofitting existing work desks, plus the price (as usual with Ikea) is quite competitive.

<comment><USER24> > plus the price (as usual with Ikea) is quite competitive.

Subjectively I've never found IKEA prices to be particularly compelling once you look past the cheap and flimsy chipboard stuff they put near the doors to wow visitors.

Durability has a price no matter who sells it.

For example a solid-wood bedframe is $1000

[http://m.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/spr/49028229/](http://m.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/spr/49028229/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love how Ikea embraces new technologies to make life actually easier, without bulls __t.

</comment><comment><USER26> When will phone makers start building these into phones so that I don't have to have attached to my phone a proprietary case -- or some special case to support a proprietary charging pad -- that always occupies my data port?

Genuine question. Does anybody know if any makers are doing this/thinking about doing this?

<comment><USER27> What modern phone doesn't have wireless charging built-in?

<comment><USER20> Ha! I _know_ that iPhones don't come with wireless charging, and I assume you do too. But I too was tempted to reply sarcastically with precisely the sentence you wrote here (especially when GP seems to be feigning ignorance of the many phones that _do_ come with built-in wireless charging, so why not mirror that feigned ignorance). Because it's surprising that the iPhone would still require fussing with wires. It's further ironic when it's made by Apple, the company that changes connectors every 2 years. You'd think the idea of doing away with connectors entirely would be appealing to them.

And to repeat the tired meme, once Apple releases an iPhone that does have wireless charging, it will be heralded as the dawn of wireless charging.

<comment><USER28> > It's further ironic when it's made by Apple, the company that changes > connectors every 2 years.

That's definitely not accurate, the 30-pin connector was introduced in 2003 and wasn't replaced until 2012.

<comment><USER29> You forgot thunderbolt, mini-display port, hdmi, micro-dvi, dvi, adc (their own spin on dvi), the two different flavors of magsafe, multiple flavors of firewire, usb-a, and now usb-c.

They did skip DisplayPort though.

<comment><USER30> Apple's not a company that thinks about the past much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Huh, about 2 years ago I gutted a "Lack" shelf from IKEA in order to put my wireless charger inside. I left the top intact so at a glance you can't even tell the charger is there. Looks like I was on to something...

</comment><comment><USER32> this is cool. my desk at work / home and my night stand I all hacked to fit these low profile qi chargers from amazon, they work great with my nexus 5 and nexus 7.

[http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Slim-Wireless-Charging- Samsung-Q...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Slim-Wireless-Charging-Samsung-Qi- Enabled/dp/B00HIZ3ZI4/)

another charging hack was putting a 5 port usb hub in the middle of my couch cushions and running the power behind them to have usb ports for charging when i wanna zone out and play xbox for half the day.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice. They are partially getting it here.

The modular aspect is good; the ones that are not modular, and not of a style you like, meh.

But more importantly there's so much more that could be done. Let's home they take this much farther. Networking, sensing, energy management, displays, ergonomics, use of vertical space...

Seems like furniture is hugely ripe for disruption, and this will at least open some eyes to the possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER34> Those plastic targets are really tacky. I will wait until the alliance for wireless power comes up with their devices.

The latter is a little more advanced. It uses magnetic resonance, so the target device can be at a small distance from the charger coil. This means that you can put the charger under a wooden board, and the device being charged on top of the board. Thus, a charging enabled table will look exactly like any other table and will not have an ugly plastic target on it.

Furthermore, the device being charged does not have to be exactly aligned, so no tacky plus signs. You can also charge several devices at one time.

What we have here is an interim half-way solution that will mostly give wireless charging a bad name for a while.

</comment><comment><USER35> My main issue with them is the small target area. Is there a significant practical challenge to make a Qi charging area that's maybe 5 times what the small chargers are? Alignment, perhaps, or power waste?

</comment><comment><USER36> The place where a wireless charger would be really useful is the car.

<comment><USER37> Only if you don't mount your phone as a GPS (or other in-car application)

<comment><USER19> Why is mounting a phone as a GPS still so terrible? I have one of those suction cup stick on ones that falls off when the outside Vs. inside temperature changes too rapidly (so often).

They either need to allow the phone's video output to be displayed on the in- car LCD (and for touch actions on the LCD to be relayed to the phone), or my preferred option just add a damn screw hole to every dashboard, so we can just screw in a GPS holder (or other accessories) and it will never ever fall off.

<comment><USER37> Have you frequently moved the suction cup since first installation? The one I bought came with a sticky coating on the suction cup, and it's a beast (never falls, difficult to remove). But I can see potential issues if the sticky coating were to wear thin

<comment><USER19> No, and I've owned two different ones with different designs. They just fall off a lot.

But around here the temp' falls to well below freezing in the winter to sometimes one hundred degrees (F) in the summer.

I just don't think suction cuffs are the best idea for this application in general. Phones are relatively heavy, cars shake from side to side, and temperature weakens the suction.

For a $1 screw thread in a hole which the manufacturer of cars could add trivially in seconds, it just seems like this should be a solved problem by now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sad truth is that it'll be a big deal when Apple releases their (proprietary?) version of wireless iPhone charging and everyone will think it's another revolution.

I'm an Android developer who just bought the new iPhone 6 and can't believe I'll have to plug it in _every time_ to charge it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Are these wireless charging pads affected by water on the surface?

I, like most people, use coffee tables, side tables, etc. to hold drinks which occasionally get condensation or spill. Would this cause any electrical hazard?

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't think charging "pads" should be considered wireless. Yes, technically they don't require a wire but when we speak about going "wireless" the idea is to be liberated from the physical constraints of the wire and be able to move around freely without restraints. These charging pads are actually LESS liberating because it requires your device to be stuck to the pad otherwise it wont charge whereas with a wire you can at least use it several feet away. I'm not sure what value this adds over charging with wire in terms of functionality. What Ubeam is working on is more exciting and revolutionary. That's REAL wireless charging!

<comment> B-Con > I'm not sure what value this adds over charging with wire in terms of > functionality.

Not sure if it's adding functionality but rather convenience. I think the goal of "charging furniture" is to pick up a collection of small charges over the day that remove the need for dedicated "inconvenient" charging times. So instead of tracking battery life and anticipating your future use and eventually coming to a point where you say "OK, now is is a good combination of low battery and convenient timing to plug my phone in and charge it" you just put it down when you sit down and magically you have a phone that lasts much longer before it needs a period of dedicated charging time.

When I got a wireless charging pad that was how I was hoping it would work. Except it didn't because it's a small pad and the phone has to be placed precisely on it and it makes an obnoxiously loud beep when charging begins. Since using it requires a mental decision and never really flows seamlessly, I really only find myself using it when I would use a charging cord anyway. But maybe the implementation in furniture may change that.

Just make the charging area large enough that I can drop it on the spot correctly on the first try reliably. (It takes me two tries on average with my current pad.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The furniture business sure would need some innovations. Perhaps Apple should expand into furnituring (seriously).

</comment><comment> Bat-fink None of these solutions ever broach the issue that a lot of Andriod users have to use oversized extended batteries. They'll never make a charging chase to accomodate my large battery, and I'll never see a reason to give up the 7800 mAh battery i have...

<comment><USER21> I certainly wouldn't say it's "a lot" of Android users. The only people I've ever known who have used oversized batteries have also had rooted phones running some alternative Android distro - hardly your "typical" user. Most average Android users don't know oversized batteries exist.

And like it or not, most new Android phones don't even have replaceable batteries, so the number of users with oversized batteries is getting smaller and smaller.

<comment><USER29> A the majority of frequent international travelers I know, both iPhone _and_ Android all have oversized batteries.

There's a whole section for them at Best Buy, they're hardly a niche product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is the best UI/UX I've seen for integrating wireless charging into our daily lives! I imagine all future furniture makers will follow and there is a great opportunity for a start-up to supply this type of technology to every furniture maker.

</comment><comment><USER43> What is the game shown on page 23?

</comment><comment><USER44> So given the marketing material there will be no support for the iPhone 6+ ?

<comment><USER45> I don't see how Ikea could have any impact on that (short of sneaking into Apple's factories and secretly adding wireless charging hardware to their phones...)

<comment><USER21> ...or releasing a case with inductive charging built in, like they're doing for the other iPhones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "APRIL" 2015

</comment><comment><USER47> I mean...there are still wires. Just not connected directly to your phone.

<comment><USER48> Yup. The difference between plugging the phone and putting it in a special Qi dock seems minimal.

Rezence's (now also Powermat's) technology I think makes more sense for something like this.

<comment><USER49> > The difference between plugging the phone and putting it in a special Qi > dock seems minimal.

I agree in terms of effort, the change is minimal, but consider a family who has 3 or 4 different devices and hence ports,. required to charge.

This means I don't need to hunt down the proper cord, we just have a couple of these devices at the front door. To me, that's eliminates a large pain in the ass.

At work no one needs to ask if someone has a black berry version 3 cord, or a "new style" Samsung galaxy cord, or the latest iPhone charging cable, you just put your phone down and walk away:)

it's a first world problem that is being solved here, but it's a big one that doesn't appear to be going away. European posturing aside.

[http://www.cnet.com/news/eu-wants-all-companies-ahem- apple-t...](http://www.cnet.com/news/eu-wants-all-companies-ahem-apple-to-use- standard-charger/)

<comment><USER50> I really thought that micro-usb everywhere would do the trick. Apple seems to be holding out, but the rest of the devices my family uses have interchangeable chargers (kindles, android phones from assorted manufacturers, tablets). Obviously, standardization of charging methods is helpful, but honestly, I don't see the advantage of choosing Qi as a standard instead of micro-usb.

<comment><USER29> > choosing Qi as a standard instead of micro-usb.

Well, if you've ever had a port or cable break on you, you should know why.

It doesn't have exposed wires or moving parts, which means it should be much harder to break. Micro-usb is only rated for 10k insertions. If you plug your phone in 10 times a day, that's 2.5 years, and Galaxy S3's are quickly coming up on that old.

<comment><USER51> 10 times a day seems like a pretty high average. I'd estimate I'm closer to 5.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cname Cloaking, the dangerous disguise of third-party trackers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disguise-of-third-party-trackers-195205dc522a <comment><USER2> At least for sites where I am expected to leave money (web shops) that would mean aggressive blocking of subdomains (just for security reasons).

I never cease to be astonished of stupidity. I can imagine that this tactic leads to all sorts of liabilities for the primary domain owner. Finally someone will deliver malware via this route.</comment>


A decentralized anonymous marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-March/013304.html <comment><USER3> Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0.

That said, some major challenges (I've done a bit of thinking about this) - First: Sybil attacks on the reputation system. The author alluded to this but the solution given was vaguely specified and somewhat reminiscent of social network driven overlays like Tonika that a) are inherently problematic for anonymity, and b) hard to grow due to aforementioned invite problem. Another problem is maintaining anonymity while making things efficient - the obvious design would be DHT based but this leads to a whole host of weaknesses (see a paper called 'Hashing it Out In Public' for details), and leads to fragility as DHTs are weakened by high rates of churn, which are quite common in real world p2p networks. Have quite a bit more to say on this topic but I'm on mobile at the moment, may write up an essay at some point.

I would encourage the OP to read up on some of Peter Todd's ideas around fidelity bonds for some ideas on the reputation aspect, also have a look at a (centralized) marketplace called NashX for dispute resolution.

EDIT: also check out the bitcoin-otc web of trust.

<comment><USER4> > Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed > distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0.

For the curious; content of market.cpp and market.h: [http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub](http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub)

<comment><USER5> This system was spread out among other files, including a review system and such. The commit where Satoshi has removed it provides a nice overview:

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as I can see, the essential problem with decentralized anonymous marketplaces is that reviews need to cost money. Plain and simple. Good reviews have great value, so they need to have a non-zero price. A vendor's review history is the indicator by which you assess whether a vendor is trustworthy or not, and a vendor should have to pay to achieve a trustworthy reputation - if good reviews are free, and you can make money from good reviews, they would have little value.

This is the reason spam emails are so frequent: you can make money from something that costs very little. If reviews were near-free, good reviews would be as plentiful as spam emails.

Free reviews means vendors can make sock-puppet accounts, fake a transaction, and leave a five-star review to themselves. With Silk Road, they take _x_ % of the value of each transaction (or if not, that's at least how it should be), so if a vendor seeks to inflate their review score, they will pay a price for it.

In fact, a good overall review score for a vendor - as far as I can tell - <USER2> the sum of all the review "values" (1 to five stars) multiplied by the value of the transaction in question. So a vendor with 10 five-star reviews on 10 orders of a value of 1 BTC each, would have the same score as a vendor with a single five-star review on a single transaction with a value of 10 BTC. Both these vendors would have paid the same amount of money to get this, equal, review score.

I've thought a bit about this, and I don't see how this can be solved in a decentralized market, with no middleman to tax transactions, and make sure that vendors can't get free reviews.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't help me to know that an anonymous person had tipped an anonymous vendor. That doesn't add much value.

However, it would be sufficient if I could somehow determine that someone that I knew had tipped the vendor.

Of course, I don't want my friends to see that I had tipped someone, or all of those of whom I have tipped. I just want it to be possible that they can see my tip, within an aggregate poll, only if and when dealing with that vendor.

<comment><USER4> > It's not important for me to know that an anonymous person tipped an > anonymous vendor. That doesn't add much value.

Allow me to disagree (with the last sentence). If you can see that a certain vendor has spent a total of, say, 100 BTC on fees, to build up a reputation, then it doesn't make financial sense for that person to try to scam you in a 1 BTC transaction.

<comment><USER6> Maybe. But, doesn't it make sense for a vendor to spend 100 BTC in fees to build a reputation so that they may scam 1,000 people in 1 BTC transactions?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it does. Which is why you have to have the trust factor incorporate the transaction volume for each vendor (calculated based on how much they've paid in fees).

Scamming 1,000 people for 1 BTC would require having 1,000 open orders for 1 BTC each at the same time. If a vendor who has paid 100 BTC in fees has over one hundred 1 BTC pending orders, you'd probably be wise to stay away. And the software can guide you in making this decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi. I've been working on a system very similar to OPs description for months now -- [http://portobello-road.org](http://portobello-road.org) . Must be an idea who's time has come, eh? Now I know how Newton and Liebniz felt when they discovered they'd simultaneously invented calculus. Aside from a few architectural decisions (hubs and marketplaces instead of DHT for seller data dissemination and indexing) things are much the same. Would love to join forces and do something cool. I've already gotten a whitepaper put together (though very incomplete I've done a lot of the work in getting a build system for LaTeX up and going and a structure in place) and an initial implementation of a downloadable nodewebkit client and some server code. Just starting on documentation of the communications protocol and getting things going, so it's not very far along. Open to all discussions and debate regarding architecture and specifics.

<comment><USER7> Oh, forgot to directly link the codebase. It's at [https://github.com/portobello-road](https://github.com/portobello-road)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a market anarchist, I think it's important to point out that the concept of 'reputation' plays a significant role in many justifications of how a market may function without regulation or any other form of state oversight.

Making a market completely anonymous significantly limits the role reputation can play, which leads me to wonder whether some of the standard arguments for the effectiveness of markets don't apply in this case.

<comment><USER9> One of the goals in the OP:

>* Allow users to maintain a pseudonymous identity that carries anonymous trust across transactions.

i.e. anonymous as in it's difficult to establish a real world identity for sellers not anonymous as in no persistent identities at all.

Bootstrapping such a marketplace is obviously difficult, since it's never safe to buy from someone without reputation but everybody starts without reputation - it might be possible to demand some proof-of-work-money to establish a marketplace identity, but I'm not sure where the money would go.

<comment><USER8> But if the identity is not connected to a real world identity, there is no legal recourse if that identity cheats you. Most who advocate a pure free market still accept the need for a legal system (not necessarily a State-based one), such that for instance people who take your money without delivering the good may be sued.

An anonymous market means that there's no legal recourse if someone cheats you or steals from you.

<comment><USER4> > An anonymous market means that there's no legal recourse if someone cheats > you or steals from you.

Which is why the protocol needs to financially discourage cheating.

Take the Bitcoin protocol, for example. It's not impossible to build a Bitcoin mining ASIC for $10M, get 30% of the network hashrate, and have a reasonable chance of reversing a 6-confirmation transaction. But unless you can find someone who is willing to accept a 6-confirmation $10M-equivalent Bitcoin transaction, it doesn't make financial sense for anyone to do so.

The same should apply for this hypothetical protocol. If you can see a merchant has spent 100 BTC to build up a reputation (eg. through proof-of- burn), he _could_ try to scam you when you buy 0.5 BTC worth of goods from him, but he wouldn't profit from it financially.

<comment><USER3> In practice it is better to build p2p systems under the stronger assumption that actors need not be economically rational. Otherwise the market could be attacked (say by a nation state that wants to kill it) by repeatedly building up rep, then scamming on a large transaction (even if the accumulated rep is worth more) to destroy faith in the market itself.

<comment><USER4> Of course. But if this is not possible, we're much better off with a system where at least actors cannot profit from being dishonest.

I think Bitcoin is a great example of a system that is not cryptographically secure per se, but still holds up because actors need to spend money to - temporarily - prevent it from functioning properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is interesting; but as a netizen taken part in international transactions outside of ebay/amazon I'm wondering how one can make the whole transaction safe/trusted in the face of complete anonymity for both seller and buyer.

Escrows are mentioned; but I can't shake the feeling that malicious individuals can game the whole system by creating a lot of sockpuppets and pulling up a smokescreen of trust, ultimately ripping somebody off in a high- value transaction, either as a seller or buyer.

It was/is possible on the platforms mentioned above; I don't imagine it more difficult in a anonymous market.

Looking forward to their results and insights to this.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a project called BitMarket that runs a market on the bitmessage platform, really neat.

[https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket](https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket)

[https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0](https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0)

<comment><USER12> Just a note: This is not decentralized, it is just a centralized marketplace using the decentralized network Bitmessage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > * Are there any similar attempts we can contribute to or borrow ideas from > instead of implementing something on our own?

RetroShare could be used as a platform for this, given that it's:

\- 100% Decentralized

\- Public key encrypted

\- Open source

...and accepts plug-ins for new features. See: [http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think they might want to reconsidert using bitmessage for communications, because it has some serious security failures as it stands. At least according to [https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0](https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0)

</comment><comment><USER15> This was what the internet was supposed to be all along, correct? A place where data can move freely from point to point without oversight or control from a central authority.

Strange that we seem to have to keep trying to get back to where we started.

<comment><USER16> this is not about data, this is about the transacting of physical goods over the internet. I am not sure you understand a) what the OP is suggesting or b) what you are saying.

<comment><USER15> Nope, I got it. I conflated "data" and "purchases", mainly because they are both transactional, and the difference between pure data and physical goods is decreasing by the day.

Thanks for pointing out the difference, though. I should have been clearer in my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> People are mentioning the need for reviews in such a marketplace. I present one possible solution:

> Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review > is weighted.

> Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are.

> A small transaction fee is collected from every transaction and distributed > to reviewers proportionate to how many votes their each of their reviews has > gotten.

I imagine this would prevent review spam, and reward people who post good reviews. In fact it could even support a class of professional reviewers making a living off of reviewing sellers and products.

<comment><USER18> This is incredibly open to abuse by both vendors and their competitors. A rater's "realness" is probably much better judged by other measures of marketplace activity or simply equal weighting than by their willingness to pay to bias the ranking of a particular review. I'd tend to defer to what's worked in other (semi) anonymous markets -- it's pretty easy to tell when someone is real or not based on their activity patterns.

A better policy is probably to keep raw information available and let people parse it in different ways, rather than baking in a risky and probably fragile system we hope will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My 2 cents: The element of trust is primary for any financial transaction. There's a reason why eBay Amazon et al employ thousands for conflict resolution b/w buyers and sellers. I wouldn't mind going on SilkRoad for acquiring something which I otherwise cannot but for items which are available elsewhere, I don't mind giving up tiny bit of control while transacting on a commercial platform like eBay.

<comment><USER20> I think the relationship is desirable, which is why some people will pay a higher price to have a relationship with a vendor, with the understanding that if s transaction goes wrong, the vendor won't balk at fixing the problem. There might also be an expectation that one party or other will extend credit for a few days.

In contrast, there are touch-and-go relationships all the time, like at convenience stores. You can't have the exchange without being present for the entire transaction, because neither party trusts the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I read this proposal I immediately thought that Namecoin could be an asset, being a decentralized DNS. Maybe use a variant of Namecoin on individual 'store' nodes to resolve them to a single (non-ICANN) TLD that can be spidered and displayed by several aggregators.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've written a description for the potential implementation of a decentralized pseudonymous marketplace. I would appreciate any critical analysis of it.

[https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market](https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market)

<comment><USER4> In my humble opinion, after the advent of bitcoin, there is no longer a reason for a client to do proof-of-work. Bitcoin basically outsources proof-of-work to miners, and presents you with a token that represents proof-of-work. As money, bitcoin proves - just as proof-of-work - that you've worked for it, there is no such thing as free money. The price of a unit of proof-of-work varies wildly, depending on what hardware you have. The price of money is the same for everyone, or at least varies much less.

The problem with proof-of-work is that attackers can invest in powerful hardware - as your spec notes - and have an advantage over other nodes. When paying in bitcoin, as a spam prevention mechanism, no one has an advantage over others. Everyone pays the current market price for bitcoins, and even the miners - who generate bitcoins, and so don't pay the market price - _can_ sell their coins at the market price, so it still comes down to " _do I want to use these bitcoins to spam this network, or do I want to sell the coins for $575 per piece?_ ".

<comment><USER12> I agree and don't plan on using PoW other than in the proof of concept. V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing). PoS doesn't require any tx in the Bitcoin network (ignoring those you used to earn the stake).

Thanks for the comment. Let me know if you have any other concerns.

<comment><USER4> > V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) > is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and > expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing).

My suggestion was related to ratings, not viewing listings. I think that if the network reaches a sufficient size (thousands of nodes), retrieving listings won't be a problem. Hosts can simply throttle connections, and refuse to send out more than a certain number of listing to a single host in a certain time frame.

I don't see proof-of-burn as bad for the Bitcoin network. Proof-of-burn transactions are instantly pruneable, so they don't really put a burden on nodes (other than the 200 bytes they take up in storage space).

<comment><USER12> Yes, every object, listings, ratings, etc. should be PoS instead of PoW. I suppose the hosts can define their throttling in the contract they make with the seller, so that isn't my decision.

PoB tx usually do require a change output along with it's burn output, and even if we weren't concerned with that, 200 bytes is 1/5000th of a block meaning only 5000 objects can be broadcasted per 10 minute period (assuming everything in the bitcoin block is a PoB tx). In other words, it doesn't scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The advantages of the anonymous marketplace only really apply to people who's work is being suppressed (activists/journalists) or who's work is rightfully being persecuted (criminals). Maybe there's a case to be made that a lot of people do want to know who they're dealing with, besides that the system (algorithm etc.) thinks they're thrust worthy.

<comment><USER23> In countries like Venezuela, where government is enforcing laws for price control and shops are shutting down everywhere, an anonymous marketplace would be a godsend.

Citizens under totalitarian regimes are the ones who benefit most from crypto currencies, crypto messaging and crypto markets.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I should have included that example. Just adding that repression on that scale actually merits regime change more than finding a workaround. Although the workaround might be more feasible in most cases. So, it's a good initiative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> SpeakEasy comes to mind. It was very much in its infancy last time I checked, but the ideas behind it seemed profound. I don't have access to .onion sites right now, and I don't have the url either, but maybe someone remembers and can post the link (assuming it's still up).

</comment><comment><USER25> Fully decentralized means everyone has their own autonomous device to act as server and client of the transactions and has a usable decentralized (probably mesh) network. P2P over the standard net is NOT fully decentralized.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure with OP doesn't address SilkRoad use cases on top of the ones he mentions, that are clearly a minority if we consider what is likely to happen.

<comment><USER27> Well, actually, one that he describes 'journalists sharing secrets' can be as big as the drug trade, if you read 'journalist' as 'black hat hacker' and 'secrets' as 'exploits'. Silk Road couldn't really do that, because of possible meddling from the central host, but without that risk…

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I want to see fewer markets. Markets create complex work for people.

<comment><USER4> A market is simply two or more people engaging in a transaction. Why would they engage in the transaction if they think it's more work for them?</comment></comment>